Weekly poll: Is iOS 14 a worthy upgrade? Can it make you switch?

iOS 14 is coming to millions of devices – everything from the iPhone 6s and older (including the original SE) – and it will improve all of those phones. Even better, the new features it brings may prove to be just what was needed for some Android users to make the jump.

The new version received some admittedly Android-like features, but also added stuff that Android should copy. We’ve written about iOS 14 at length, so we’ll just go over the highlights quickly before pointing you to the polling station.

Widgets are finally treated as first-class citizens – having them on the lock screen or the Today view always felt like an afterthought. Android users may be feeling smug, but widget stacks are an interesting idea.

New in iOS 14: home screen widgets • App Library

Maybe you think that widgets don’t work great without an app drawer. Instead of adding one, Apple copied the Smart Folder concept from macOS – things are automatically sorted into folders based on category. The App Library is not quite the same thing as it works only on app shortcuts and not files, but still.

An even bigger change is the option to set a different default browser and email apps. You probably don’t care about Safari’s rendering engine vs. that of Chrome, but you do care whether bookmarks and passwords will sync to your desktop P. And since most iPhone owners don’t have a Mac, people had to juggle two browsers just to get some sync action.

New in iOS 14: Better privacy features • iMessage improvements

Again, Android users may not be impressed. But the new privacy features in iOS 14 is something that Android needs – there’s indicator when an app uses your camera or mic, you can give an app only approximate location and allows you to expose only some photos rather than your whole gallery (previously it was an all-or-nothing affair).

There are many more interesting iOS 14 features, these were just some of the highlights. Better group chat features, Maps improvements, Siri’s translation mode and a few other features were things that Android previously did better than iOS. Now iOS may be a viable alternative to even hard-core Android users – or is it?

Keep in mind that it's still in the beta stage, the stable release should be around the time the iPhone 12 models are unveiled. Also, some of the improvements (like the faster camera) will benefit new models more than the old ones.